In Michael De Luca’s First Deal, Sony Pictures Acquires David Ignatius Novel ‘The Director’ For Paul Greengrass And Scott Rudin

BREAKING: Well, looks like former New Line production president Michael De Luca isn’t taking long to make that transition to the executive suites. I’m told that his first deal at Sony Pictures as production president is The Director, a novel by David Ignatius that reteams De Luca with his Captain Phillips producer Scott Rudin and director Paul Greengrass. De Luca, Rudin and Dana Brunetti produced Captain Phillips.

Greengrass will adapt the novel — will be published by W.W. Norton in June — and direct the film. This comes as Captain Phillips became a global hit and got four Golden Globe nominations. In The Director, Graham Weber has been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents’ names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.

Weber isn’t sure where to turn until he meets a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He’s the CIA’s in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction — one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it’s drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double-dealing — about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted.

De Luca officially starts at the studio February 1, after he finishes producing Fifty Shades Of Grey. He also worked with Rudin as producer on The Social Network. He is sharing the president of production title with Hannah Minghella. Elizabeth Cantillon will oversee the project for the studio.

CAA reps Greengrass and made the author’s deal with Rafe Sagalyn of The Sagalyn Agency.

Rudin and Greengrass are separately working on the Martin Luther King drama Memphis.